His parents are not able to reciprocate his need for support, love and understanding and constantly pressurise him to perform well in studies, a pressure that he is not at all able to take and worse, he can’t even talk about it. He develops a fear of expressing himself to his parents and starts resenting all their efforts to make him understand the need to perform in order to survive in this over-competitive world. Exasperated and unable to comprehend his behaviour, his parents send him to a boarding school much to his dislike.

Ishaan had uncanny painting skills and through his paintings he used to express himself. But it needed a sensitive eye to notice the pain expressed in his paintings. His elder brother being a scholar and performer, his parents wanted Ishaan to follow in his elder brother’s footsteps but in this process, they got alienated from him. His inability to perform and stand up to the expectations of his parents brutally murdered his self-confidence and this further drove him away from his family. To depict this pain he painted a series of paintings of his parents, his brother and himself and in each successive painting he conveyed that he was gradually moving away from his family. When the paintings were flipped in a sequence, it depicted his slow alienation from his family - his support system and his recession - into the oblivion of loneliness and silence.

The pain the young, innocent and fragile Ishaan could not express through words took the form of brush-strokes. The messages he conveyed through his paintings at a tender age of nine had the potential to rattle the hearts of grown-ups as well. The mode of communication that Ishaan developed was certainly unconventional but the compulsion underlying the foundation of its development was nurtured and nourished by the inability of the society to understand his pain and the unusual form of expression he took up. The view that words are the only form of efficient communication and other forms of arts like painting, literature and music are just modes of recreation, makes ’different’ souls like Ishaan find it difficult to survive in this world.

Such sad reception of other forms of arts has also led to the formation of a norm in the society that until and unless a child performs well in studies and gets top grades, he has no stay and say in this ultra-competitive world. Even if the child has some serious problem continuing his studies and has some other talents that he wants to develop, he is forbidden to do so till he rebels against it and ensures that he has his own way. This could be easy for a normal child but for a visibly compromising child like Ishaan, who craves for understanding to convey his inabilities, resentment and resorts to rebellious techniques to nurture his talent, it cannot be an easy task.

If the liveliness of such a child is killed in the initial foundational years, then the society stands the risk of losing invaluable talents. In today’s world, everyone wants their child to be a topper - a doctor, an engineer or an MBA and parents put a lot of pressure on their kids to perform up to their expectations.